How to Get Rich (Sort of) Playing Free Phone Trivia Apps

News - July 12th, 2018

I enjoy trivia enough that I’ve paid to participate for most of my adult life. I’ve been to countless bar trivia nights, trying to win prize money that barely covers the tab. I pay $30 a year to take part in an online trivia league called Learned League, which offers no prize other than the ability to check whether you correctly answer questions that former Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings got wrong. Then in 2017, something wonderful happened: Some geniuses (or idiots, I haven’t figured out which) decided to launch a free app that pays people for answering trivia questions. HQ became a sensation, sweeping offices, college campuses, and anywhere else where people like winning money and wasting time.

In June, I was particularly devastated after missing the final question on the app SwagIQ. The question asked which of three scenarios involving the World Cup trophy had really happened; one of the options was that the trophy had been stolen, and that it was later found by a dog named Pickles. I quickly eliminated this from the running—I love dogs, international sporting events, and reading Wikipedia pages for various heists. Surely, I figured, I would know if the World Cup trophy had once been recovered by a dog named Pickles.